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Month: August 2014

Just as a pile of puzzle pieces doesn’t inherently add up to a masterpiece, Let’s Be Cops has precious few laughs for a movie starring people as historically funny as Jake Johnson, Damon Wayans Jr. (both from New Girl), Rob Riggle and Keegan Michael Key. In fact, it has precious few laughs at all.

Robin Williams, who passed away on Monday, was agile, versatile, quick-witted and almost overwhelmingly boisterous. Energy seemed to flow from everywhere else into him and then back out again in a million tiny, disparate fragments. Even at his most serious, he seemed incapable of turning off the parts of himself that might come across as obnoxious or excessive in the wrong directorial hands. As a performer, he was like a rubber band perpetually on the brink of snapping. Last night, we learned what we already knew but couldn’t bring ourselves to talk about: that metaphor applied to his life as well as his art.

Guardians of the Galaxy is a movie in which a talking raccoon is friends with a talking tree, Andy Dwyer is buff and Dave Bautista demonstrates deft comedic timing. It’s a superhero movie with heroes who aren’t particularly super or heroic. It’s a space opera in an era when that sort of movie has been increasingly marginalized, though Star Wars Episode VII: The Never-Ending Hype Machine will reverse that trend next year. And it’s a Marvel movie that rarely feels weighted down by its obligation to feed the Avengers beast.